Temp files are lingering when MS office 2007 programs close.

We are running Windows server 2003 and XP on our workstations.

On our share drive we are having the an issue that when any MS office program is opened a temp file is created and normally it will go away when the program is closed but they are not. There are quite a few temp files building up in our share drive.

Im really not even sure where to begin with this

Thanks in advance for the help

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAsked: 2012-12-20

Who is Participating?

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Bill BachPresidentCommented: 2012-12-21

When and where Word creates temporary files
The location where Word creates the temporary files is hardcoded information and cannot be edited. Therefore, it is important that NTFS permissions for the user are set accordingly. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
277867 Windows NTFS permissions are required when you run Word on any NTFS partition that has Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Vista installed
In general, Word creates temporary files for the following types of data.

LVL 29

Bill BachPresidentCommented: 2012-12-20

Normally, MS Office will delete these files. My guess is that you have an anti-virus solution that is attempting to scan these files, and it has the files open when the DELETE operation is attempted, which then causes it to fail.

Try excluding the files from your AV solution & see if that helps.

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Bill BachPresidentCommented: 2012-12-20

If that doesn't help, then running Process Monitor on a workstation and monitoring the file system access to that folder may yield some clues, too.

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-20

That could be it but there are hundreds of temp files. I can't just exclude MS office files from our scans. It's on a share drive for over five thousand users. This would be a huge vulnerability.

On one of the folders with the issue the owner was nothing but an SID which usually means that the user that created the folder is deleted. Could this be and issue. I changed the owner to administrator.

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Bill BachPresidentCommented: 2012-12-20

Agreed. However, you should be able to exclude JUST the temp files, based on the naming convention.

It could be that the users don't have rights to delete files, either, so be sure to check rights for each user that is able to access the folder.

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-20

Okay yeah, I should be able to do that. That would make sense then if the file is being scanned then it won't delete because it is active. I've seen similar issues.

That's exactly what I was thinking with the ownership. That users couldn't delete the files. I picked a particular folder on the share drive and deleted all the .tmp files and changed the owner to administrator. I will run a search tomorrow and see the how many .tmp files are there... If any. If there are then i will exclude *.tmp files from the AV scans.

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-21

Apparently this is a common issue with MS office 2007 and 2010. They are saying that is users that do not have modify permissions that get this issue. I looked at the ownership of the .tmp files and they are being created by such users. I'm not sure id there is a patch for this. I wonder if there is a way around it because i really only want to give certain users modify permissions.

This is where is found that.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-excel/office-2007-creates-xxxxxxxxtmp-files-in-same/eb7ee34d-3a02-4fe7-a1f3-9a208439d84a

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Bill BachPresidentCommented: 2012-12-21

According to this Microsoft KB article, the simple answer is "No way, Jose"!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211632

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-21

I don't see where it says that this isn't possible. Maybe i am misreading it lol

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-21

Oh wow im dumb thanks i will let them know that.

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Josef Al-ChacarSystems AdministratorAuthor Commented: 2012-12-21

This may be a stupid question. Is there any way to give "ordinary" users permission to only delete .tmp files? I have never heard of this but it would be awesome if there was a way